Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Pascoe Youth Sexuality New Media Use
Pascoe Youth Sexuality New Media Use
DOI 10.1007/s13178-011-0042-5
This paper address Thurlows concern about the situatedness of youth new media practices. Looking at youth new
media use in their social, romantic, and sexual lives
indicates that new media technologies offer resources and
pose risks for teens in their romance and sexuality practices.
New media provide communication resources with which
to seek out, build, and end intimate relationships. Online
venues also provide important resources for information
about issues of gender, sexuality, and relationships. That
said, the online world is not without its dangers. Often these
dangers are framed as issues of sexting or unwanted sexual
attention from unfamiliar adults. However, this paper makes
the case that it is necessary to pay attention to other, less
sensational risks, in the ways that offline inequalities might
be replicated in online environments. That is, inequalities in
access and use might shape youths sexual and social
experiences as online venues and access to them might
reflect offline inequalities in gender, sexuality, and class.
Methods
The data in this paper are drawn from a multi-year, multi-site,
collaborative ethnographic research project examining youth
and new media use across a range of ages and locations. It
comprised 28 researchers and research associates conducting
23 case studies. For a further description of the larger research
project and approach, please see Hanging Out, Messing
Around and Geeking Out (Ito et al. 2009).
This paper draws from interviews, diary studies, and
ethnography with youth between the ages of 15 and 19
from across the USA. The research for this project included
on- and off-line research. I conducted 40 interviews, 33 of
which were performed in person and seven of which were
conducted online. In these interviews, I asked respondents
to discuss their regular new media use; examined their cell
phones for calls, text messages, and pictures; visited their
favorite web pages; and discussed their social network site
profiles and other digital creations.
I also conducted nine diary studies with a subset of the
interview subjects in which they were asked to keep track of
their daily new media use. These diary studies consisted of
youth taking pictures of technology every time they used it
and then sending me an SMS message about what they were
doing, who they were doing it with, and the length of time
they engaged in that activity. They completed this diary study
over the course of 48 hours. I then interviewed them about the
contents of their diary. Because some new media use occurs
when youth are alone, this approach helped to provide access
to those more private realms of technological practice.
I recruited participants through online social networks,
offline social circles, email lists, snowball sampling, and
through classes at two northern California high schools. I
Resources
Relationships
The primary foci of youth culture are love, romance, and
sexuality (Subrahmanyam and Greenfield 2008). Indeed
2
Between 2004 and 2008, the percentage of teens who said they use
email declined from 89% to 73% (Jones and Fox 2009).
10
11
12
Risks
While youth use new media in their sexual and romantic
practices and they can find sexual resources online, none of
this is to say that there are not risks online for which youth
are both prepared and unprepared. Importantly, not all of
the risks related to new media and youth sexuality are those
around which contemporary moral panics revolve. Most of
these risks are as much about gendered, classed, and raced
inequalities as they are about online predators. Thinking
and policy making about these risks thus needs to include
attention to young peoples actual experiences of technology use and the replication of offline inequalities in online
13
14
15
Conclusion
This article looked to put into context stories like Jessie
Logans by exploring the relationships between young
peoples sexuality and new media use in their daily lives.
These practices indicate that youth, in this study, are not
necessarily meeting older adults for sexual liaisons, being
traumatized by online predators, or experiencing cyberbullying that is quantifiably more common than the offline
bullying they may experience. In fact, their online
experiences are much more complex than that.
Youth have quickly put new media to use in their
intimate relationships. The sexual practices in which young
people engage take place in the context of these social
relationships. The private, peer-oriented, and sometimes
anonymous forums offered by new media help to manage
the vulnerability inherent in such relationships. As such,
new media are an ideal venue for conveying information
about sensitive and potentially embarrassing topics like sex
and sexuality.
Youth are eager to receive information about sexuality
and relationships information and, statistically, are not
likely receiving it elsewhere. They are turning to websites,
discussion boards, and text messages to learn about their
own sexuality, their bodies, and safer sex practices. They
are also turning to each other through mediated means. By
publicizing these resources and ensuring the information is
both available and accurate, health practitioners can
circumvent some of the restrictions educators experience
when it comes to the topic of sex and intimate relationships.
However, not all youth have equal access to new media,
so when interventions are designed to bring information to
young people about sexual health, we need to keep in mind
the audience a given intervention might reach. Racial and
16
References
Abbott, C. (1998). Making connections: young people and the
internet. In J. Sefton-Green (Ed.), Digital diversions: youth
culture in the age of multimedia (pp. 84105). London: UCL.
Baron, N. (2008). Always on: language in an online and mobile
world. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Bay-Cheng, L. (2005). Left to their own devices: disciplining youth
discourse on sexuality education electronic bulletin boards.
Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2(1), 3750.
Bogle, K. (2008). Hooking up: sex, dating, and relationships on
campus. New York: New York University Press.
Brown, B. B. (1999). Youre going out with who? Peer group
influences on adolescent romantic relationships. In W. Furman,
B. B. Brown, & C. Feiring (Eds.), The development of romantic
relationships in adolescence (pp. 291329). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Celizic, M. (2010). Teen sexting: youthful prank or sex crime?
Retrieved November 23, 2010, from http://today.msnbc.msn.
com/id/29613192.
Cohen, S. (2002). Folk devils and moral panics: the creation of the
mods and rockers. New York: Routledge.
Collins, W. A., & Sroufe, L. A. (1999). Capacity for intimate
relationships: a developmental construction. In W. Furman, B.
B. Brown, & C. Feiring (Eds.), The development of romantic
relationships in adolescence (pp. 125147). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Connell, C. (2009). Beyond the birds and the bees: learning inequality
through sexuality education. American Journal of Sexuality
Education, 4(2), 83.
Crowley, M. S. (2010). How r u??? Lesbian and bi-identified youth on
MySpace. Journal of Lesbian Studies, 14(1), 5260.
Dennis, J. P. (2010). Drawing desire: male youth and homoerotic fan
art. Journal of LGBT Youth, 7(1), 628.
Diamond, L. M., Savin-Williams, R., & Dube, E. M. (1999). Sex,
dating, passionate friendships, and romance: intimate peer
relations among lesbian, gay, and bisexual adolescents. In W.
17
Osgerby, B. (2004). Youth media. New York: Routledge.
Pascoe, C. J. (2007). Dude, youre a fag: masculinity and sexuality
in high school. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Patchin, J. W., & Hinduja, S. (2010). Trends in online social
networking: adolescent use of MySpace over time. New Media
& Society, 12(2), 197216.
Rabin, R. C. (2010). New spending for a wider range of sex
education. New York Times, May 10.
Rideout, V., Roberts, D., & Foehr, U. (2005). Generation M: media in
the lives of 818 year-olds. Menlo Park: The Henry J. Kaiser
Family Foundation.
Roberts, D. F., & Foehr, U. G. (2008). Trends in media use. Future of
Children, 18(1), 1137.
Russell, S. T. (2005). Introduction to positive perspectives on
adolescent sexuality. Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2
(4), 13.
Schalet, A. (2000). Raging hormones, regulated love: adolescent
sexuality and the constitution of the modern individual in the
United States and the Netherlands. Body & Society, 6(1), 75105.
Smith, A. (2007). Teen and online stranger contact. Washington: Pew/
Internet.
Soderlund, G. (2008). Journalist or panderer? Framing underage
webcam sites. Sexuality Research and Social Policy: Journal of
NSRC, 5(4), 62.
Subrahmanyam, K., & Greenfield, P. (2008). Online communication
and adolescent relationships. The Future of Children, 18(1), 119.
Suzuki, L. K., & Calzo, J. P. (2004). The search for peer advice in
cyberspace: an examination of online teen bulletin boards about
health and sexuality. Applied Developmental Psychology, 25,
685698.
Thompson, K. W. (1998). Moral panics. London: Routledge.
Thurlow, C., & Bell, K. (2009). Against technologization: young
peoples new media discourse as creative cultural practice.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 14(4), 1038
1049.
Thurlow, C., & McKay, S. (2003). Profiling new communication
technologies in adolescence. Journal of Language and Social
Psychology, 22(94), 94.
Tolani, A. T., & Yen, S. (2009). Many websites fail to dispel myths
about IUDs, emergency contraception, birth control, and proper
timing of pap smears. Stanford: Lucile Packard Childrens
Hospital, Stanford University.
Wang, R., Bianchi, S., & Raley, S. (2005). Teenagers internet use and
family rules: a research note. Journal of Marriage and the
Family, 67, 12491258.
Wells, M., & Mitchell, K. J. (2008). How do high-risk youth use the
internet? Characteristics and implications for prevention. Child
Maltreatment, 13(3), 227.